ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 8, 1996 TAG: 9608080037
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
SOURCE: Associated Press
OK, NOT EVERYBODY who subscribes to America Online sat motionless Wednesday. But many were perturbed.
America Online was knocked out Wednesday by a technical glitch, leaving more than 6 million customers worldwide without their e-mail and favorite Web sites.
The nation's largest on-line service, based in Chantilly, crashed about 4 a.m. during routine maintenance. The outage is probably the biggest in on-line history, said Mark Mooradian of Jupiter Communications, a New York on-line marketing company.
``Goodbye from America Online. The system is temporarily unavailable,'' was the message customers got when they tried to log in. They were asked to try again in 15 minutes ... then one hour ... then an hour and 15 minutes.
The system was still down late Wednesday.
System maintenance is generally done in the middle of the night to inconvenience the fewest possible members.
``What happened was when we were doing the installation, we had a technical problem,'' America Online spokeswoman Pam McGraw.
She would not disclose the exact problem but said it was different from a software glitch that brought down America Online's e-mail system for an hour June 19.
Yvette DeBow of Jupiter Communications attributed the outage to growing pains at America Online, which had 5 million members at the beginning of the year and now has 6.3 million.
``They've added a lot of new subscribers. They told me it was a main database problem that they were taking [the system] off-line to fix. Because there are so many members and so much information, it's going to take a while to get everything up and running,'' she said.
Steve Case, America Online chairman, said the company was doing everything it could to restore service.
Across the country, users encountered blank screens and an empty feeling.
``My whole company is stopped. We've got people running around trying to do stuff off-line. Everyone's suddenly realizing how addicted they are to instant access,'' said E. David Ellington, president and chief executive of NetNoir, a San Francisco-based media company.
Still, Ellington was philosophical about the breakdown, which took his company's World Wide Web site off-line: ``Hello, gang, welcome to technology. It's not perfect, so get over it.''
DeBow said the outage will probably not cause customers to drop America Online in droves.
``Users of on-line services are still aware that this is a new industry that's growing. People who use computers are pretty familiar with just how fragile they can be at times,'' she said.
Still, CompuServe, the nation's second largest commercial on-line service, is already touting the reliability of its network.
``If you need to get on line, come on over to CompuServe. We're up and running and raring to go,'' spokesman Jeff Shafer said.
LENGTH: Medium: 62 linesby CNB